1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for moving contents, particularly, to an apparatus and method for moving contents capable of moving contents having a restricted number of copies to another storage media.
2. Description of the Background Art
Recently, due to rapid growth of computer and communication technologies, information and communication have become more important in everyday life as well as science and business. Particularly, in the current information age, since every country in the world is constructing high speed communications nets competitively, various information will be provided, transmitted and consumed and a considerable part of such information will be secured by the copyright law.
Recorders, video recorders and copy machines using the analogue method make differences in quality between the original and the copy in costs, time and convenience and accordingly, those things can not actually significantly affect the copyright.
However, works on information and communication media such as the Internet significantly affect the copyright since the copy and the original are 100% identical and through the Internet images and voices as well as texts can be transmitted to the whole world.
Also, in the broadcasting field, the TV transmitting method is digitized by generalization of the digital compression technology and development of inexpensive receivers and accordingly, copy of contents through broadcasting affects the copyright significantly.
In the information age where all works such as images and records are digitized, infringement of the copyright has become easy and done in various forms and accordingly, exposing and getting rid of infringement of the copyright is difficult.
Therefore, since writing will is decreased and distribution of intellectual property rights is hindered unless the infringement of intellectual properties is prevented or the technologies for exposing the infringement is prevented, enterprises related to copyrights are making much effort to develop copy protecting technology as a technological means to secure works.
In the present, as a general technology for protecting copy, there is a method of restricting the number of copies to a certain number by inserting a copy control code in a header part of contents. The above technology will be applied to broadcasting contents as the digital broadcasting is popularized and the technology is partly now in use.
FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram showing a copy apparatus of a conventional digital broadcast receiver.
As shown in FIG. 1, the conventional digital broadcast receiver includes a TV broadcast receiver 100 for receiving contents which a broadcasting station transmits and a recording apparatus 200 for storing the received contents.
The above TV broadcast receiver 100 includes a receiving unit 110 for receiving the contents and a first storage medium 120 for storing the contents supplied from the receiving unit 110 and the recording apparatus 200 includes a second storage medium 210 for storing the contents transmitted from the first storage medium 120.
The operation of a copying apparatus for the conventional digital broadcasting receiver will be described with reference to accompanied drawings as follows.
The receiving unit 110 of a TV broadcasting receiver receives contents transmitted through transmission media such as broadcast satellite or cable and stores the contents in the built-in first storage medium 120. At this time, the possible number of copies of the contents is decreased by one.
With the above storage method, the contents can be stored by the storage command of a user or new contents can be continuously stored automatically deleting old contents at a certain time interval according to the composition of the TV broadcast receiver 100.
Later, when the user demands to copy the contents to the second storage medium, the TV broadcast receiver 100 reads the contents from the first storage medium and judges the possible number of copy by analyzing the copy control code inserted in the header part of the contents.
FIG. 3 is a view showing a packet including a header in accordance with a conventional data packet. “DATA LENGTH” field specifies the length of the data field of data block payload packets and data block packets; “TAG” field provides a high-level label for the format of data carried by the packet; “CHANNEL” field specifies the channel number for the packet; “TCODE” field represents a transaction code, which specifies the packet format and the type of transaction to be performed; and “SY” field represents a synchronization code, and is an application-specific control field.
At this time, as shown in FIG. 3, the copy control code uses 2 bits among 4 bits of a synchronous bits in the header part of the data packet and is divided to unrestricted copy, restricted copy, a single copy and no copy according to the set value (00,01,10,11). Also, the other 1 bit is used in an encryption code of the data stream and the least significant bit of the synchronous bits is a reserved bit and not used.
After, TV broadcast receiver 100 reads the copy control code of the stored contents in the first storage medium, the TV broadcast receiver 100 copies the contents to the second storage medium according to the judged possible number of copy.
Namely, as shown in FIG. 2, if the copy control code is set as unrestricted copy (S201), the TV broadcast receiver 100 does not convert the copy control code and copies the contents to the second storage medium (S202 and S203), if the copy control code is set as restricted copy(S204), the receiver 100 stores the contents in the second storage medium 210 after decreasing by one from the possible number of copies by converting the copy control code(S205 and S206). On the contrary, if the copy control code is set as no copy, the TV broadcast receiver 100 can not copy the contents to the second storage medium regardless of demand of the user (S207).
By the way, the first storage medium 120 is restricted in capacity. Therefore, if the copy control code is set to no copy in case the user of the digital broadcast receiver is willing to store the contents for a long time or edit the contents, copying or editing of the contents from the first storage medium 120 to the second storage medium 210 is impossible.